How to create an animating Plasma ball in Blender?
Using some modifiers (even if first though was about Animation Nodes):

The base mesh is a tube, larger at the two points connected to the inner and outer spheres. This mesh has its origin at the center of the sphere.
It is also parented to an empty, which is at the center too.
The empty rotation is animated.

This object has several modifiers:

One array which origin is an animated empty, so that we have several instances of this mesh around the center.

A second one with same principle to vary the rotations


.
Then two displacements, one for the main part (the tube), one for the part attached to the outer sphere.
These displacements use another empty as coordinates objects. When this empty is animated, it makes variations in the displacement.

The displacement itself is based on a distorted noise.
Finally, a shrinkwrap to make sure the extremity stays on the sphere surface and a subdivision.